Windows Azure as Top Cloud Choice for Developers is what the head of Microsoft’s Windows Azure team said at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). Microsoft has positioned Windows Azure as the “general purpose” cloud platform in the cloud hosting industry. The key Microsoft officials delivered targeted messages about the Windows Azure platform as the more mainstream, general-purpose cloud platform as compared to competing offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com’s solutions, among others.

“At Microsoft we’re pulling platform as a service (PAAS) and infrastructure as a service (IAAS) together in Windows Azure,” said Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. “Windows Azure is the world’s first general purpose cloud platform,” he added.

Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Server and Cloud Division said in an interview when asked about the Windows Azure cloud server; “Google is a platform as a service, but it’s only restricted to two languages – Python and Java. You have to fit in with the way they do things. We’re being general purpose. Amazon is an infrastructure as a service; they provide no tools support. How you develop your applications is your concern. You’re on your own. We support any language and multiple frameworks. We provide a rich ecosystem of technology or you can use open source software like MySQL or Apache. Our approach is we don’t put any shackles on the developer.”

Srivastava who is part of the Azure “Red Dog” development team that created the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, said from its inception Windows Azure targeted developers.

“When we were developing Azure from day one it was done for developers,” he said. “You have to allow developers to bring their skills, their current set of skills, to the cloud. So we said developers should get to choose tha language they want to use. You can use any environment you want. You can use Visual Studio or you can do the entire development in Eclipse. You can’t pigeonhole developers into one or two languages or one or two frameworks. Just because our lineage is Windows Server doesn’t mean we will restrict you to using C# or a Microsoft language.”